Jargon Chaff File

This is the chaff file. It contains all the entries which have been
added to the Jargon File at some point and later rejected for various reasons
(usually because they're mainstream English or straight techspeak). They are
kept up-to date with the current master format conventions.

[ALGOrithmic Language] The common ancestor of C and the Pascal
family (including Ada and the various versions of Modula). One of the
great pioneering efforts in language design; indeed, it has been said that
Algol was a great improvement over most of its successors.

archiver: n.

/ar'kie-vr/ A utility that
can pack and unpack file sets and/or entire directory hierarchies to and
from an `archive' format including the file data and information such as
its creation date and size. There are many of these, used both for backups
but in preparing software distributions for cross-network transport.
UNIX's tar(1) and cpio(1), Windows's ARC.EXE, and zoo(1) for both UNIX and
Windows handle archive formats often used not only on these systems but in
many other environments which must communicate with them regularly.

balanced: /bal'@nst/, adj.

Said of a system in which investment in major resources (memory,
disk and CPU cycles) have been matched to the job load in such a way that
programs are not typically all waiting on the same resource. See
bottleneck, hot spot.

bit mask: n.

A string of bits in core that is interpreted
by hardware or software as enable/disable flags for
some related set of options or operations. May be used either of hardware
flags wired into a computer system's control logic or of software flags
controlling some part of a program's execution. Connotes a relatively small
set of bits (a byte or word) as opposed to a bit
vector which may be of any length. See also bit
bashing.

bit vector: n.

See bit mask.

escape: n.

1. The ASCII character ESC, hex 1b, octal 033, usually labelled ESC
or (rarely) ALTMODE on terminal keyboards. Some operating systems
(including older UNIXes) use this character to indicate that output is to
be suspended.

2. A special character that may cause the following character to
have other than its usual meaning, esp. used under UNIX for the backslash
character `\'. Such a character, used to prevent the special meaning of a
wildcard or other special character, is said to `escape' the character from
its special meaning. Use of this sort of literalizing to quote quote
characters or other special syntax is often called
escapement; the use of `\' is often specifically
slashification.

giant blue lobster: n.

The default absurd mythological animal. This originated among
aficionados of Live Action Role Playing, a hobby largely inhabited by
hackers. A 1987 LARP game called `Starlight Rendezvous' featured several
characters who were, in game, giant blue lobsters (complete with giant
lobster armor artfully sculpted out of blue foam rubber). These
`Klik-kliks' were obstreperous beings whose idea of diplomacy was to sidle
up to other players, insult them, and declaim “We have giant blue
pincer claws and we're not afraid to use them” in gruff voices
resembling Richard Nixon's. Eventually one was tossed in a jacuzzi by a
crowd chanting “Drawn butter! Drawn butter!”. The lobsters
became a running joke in later LARPs, and have since often been invoked in
conversation by hackers who were not present for the original game and,
indeed, have only a vague idea about where the image derives from.

GUI: /goo'ee/, n.

[acronym for “graphical user interface”] A combination
of a particular window system (such as X, NeWS or PM) and an
interface-design policy for applications. In 1990, prominant GUIs battling
it out for mind-share include AT&T/Sun's Open Windows, OSF's Motif,
HP's New Wave and Microsoft's Presentation Manager interface. See
FUD Wars.

IPL: /ie-pee-el/, v.,n.

[acronym for Initial Program Load] Synonym for
boot. Usage: now rare, reported at IBM and
Motorola. Formerly more common at IBM shops.

kernel: /ker'nl/

[from UNIX, now also used elsewhere] The resident portion of the
operating system; that which handles I/O dispatch, runs and schedules
processes, and provides other system services to applications through TRAPs
or system calls. Distinguished from application libraries (on the one hand)
and the system shell or command interpreter on the
other.

native mode: /nay'tiv mohd/, n.

On hardware or software supporting several functional modes, some
designed to emulate the behavior of other similar products, `native mode'
is the one (usually default) command set or feature set that is
not an emulation. Example: many smart CRTs support
ANSI or vt100 emulations in addition to the default native mode defined by
the manufacturer.

pass-by-name: /pas-bie-naym'/, n.

See thunk. Abandoned as a technique by HLL
language designers many years ago except in explicit
macro processing; it's too expensive and makes side
effects too hard to track. Can be inexactly simulated in C or LISP by using
the macro facility. See also pass-by-reference,
pass-by-value.

pass-by-reference: /pas-bie-re'fr@ns/, n.

A mode of argument-passing supported by Pascal `var' arguments and
in some other languages which requires the caller to give the name of a
variable as the actual and binds the formal to the
address (in effect) of the variable. Variables passed
to a function by reference can be modified in place by the function. This
can be simulated in C using the address (&) operator in the function
invocation and the pointer-dereference (*) operator within the body of the
function. See pass-by-name,
pass-by-value.

pass-by-value: /pas-bie-val'yoo/, n.

The simplest and most `natural' form of argument passing (and the
default in all modern HLLs); the value of the actual argument expression is
computed once at function-call time and the corresponding formal is bound
to it for the scope of the function. See
pass-by-name,
pass-by-reference.

race condition: n.

A class of bug in multi-tasking, multi-threaded or event-driven
systems arising from situations in which code will fail if one task gets to
a particular execution point before another has had time to prepare for
that event. In UNIX, often used to refer to various kinds of
lossage due to V7 and USG UNIX's non-self-resetting
signal(2) facilities; if two signals hit a process in rapid succession, the
second may arrive before the signal handler can reset itself, resulting in
process death and potentially infinite
screwage.

RISC: /risk/

[Reduced Instruction Set Computer] An architectural approach to
processor pioneered at Berkeley in the early 1980s which emphasizes simple
fixed-length instructions implemented in random logic or PLAs, as opposed
to the older style that came to be called CISC [Complex Instruction Set
Computer] architectures typified by the VAX in which
elaborate microcode is used to implement bushels of addressing modes and
special-case instructions of wildly varying length. RISC processors also
generally feature a large file of orthogonal
registers and register windowing to reduce HLL function-call overhead. The
theory behind all this was to optimize to the code-generating style of HLL
compilers rather than human programmers, trading away instruction-set
complexity to eliminate decode overhead and improve performance. It worked;
see killer micro.

RMS: //

Nom de guerre of Richard M. Stallman, archetypal AI hacker famous in
particular for 1) inventing EMACS, 2) his belief that making money from
software is evil, and 3) the consequent creation of the Free Software
Foundation. See copyleft,
demigod, EMACS,
GNU, Symbolics.

signal: /sig'nl/, n.

[from UNIX] A software interrupt, especially one which dispatches to
a handler written in an application (as opposed to merely triggering a
system-level event).

spoofing: n.

In the subjargon of computer security specialists, an attack which
relies on the inability of users or computer programs to verify the
identity or location of a communication partner. A
mockingbird spoofs the computer's login sequence to
fool a user; some cracking software repeatedly spoofs human login actions
to fool the computer.

stub: /stuhb/, n.

A dummy routine which either performs no action or simply announces
its presence, inserted at the bottom of a call hierarchy to verify that the
control flow at all levels above it is functioning as intended.

Symbolics: /sim-bo'liks/, n.

[aka `Slymebolics' /sliem-bah'liks/] A manufacturer of Lisp
Machines that evolved out of the MIT lisp machines. Once thought by some
to be evil incarnate because they were making money from software. (See
RMS) They lost this status when they proved that
they weren't interested in making money from software. See
seer.

seer: v.

To take a marginally successful but poorly managed company and drive
it completely into the ground. The word comes from Brian Seer, a man who
was brought in from the outside to manage Symbolics. His tenure there led
to the following joke:

Q: What do Brian Seer and Richard Stallman have in common?

A: Neither of them believes in making money from software.

[Editorial disclaimer: RMS protest that this joke misrepresents his
position] See also GNU.

Deleted before 2.1.1 or earlier

1. To behave spastically or erratically; more often, to commit a
single gross error. “Boy, is he spazzing!”

2. n. One who spazzes. “Boy, what a spazz!”

3. n. The result of spazzing. “Boy, what a
spazz!”

waterbottle soccer: n.

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A deadly sport practiced mainly by Sussman's graduate students. It,
along with chair bowling, is the most evident manifestation of the "locker
room atmosphere" said to reign in that sphere. (Sussman doesn't approve.)

[As of 11/82, it's reported that the sport has given way to a new
game called “disc-boot”, and Sussman even participates
occasionally.]

sixty-nine: adj.

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Large quantity. Usage: Exclusive to MIT-AI. "Go away, I have 69
things to do to DDT before worrying about fixing the bug in the phase of
the moon output routine..."

[Note: Actually, any number less than 100 but large enough to have no
obvious magic properties will be recognized as a "large number". There is
no denying that "69" is the local favorite. I don't know whether its
origins are related to the obscene interpretation, but I do know that 69
decimal = 105 octal, and 69 hexadecimal = 105 decimal, which is a nice
property. - GLS]

PTY: n., /pi'tee/

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Pseudo TTY, a simulated TTY used to run a job under the supervision
of another job. PTYJOB/pi'tee/n. The job being run on the PTY. Also a common
general-purpose program for creating and using PTYs. This is DEC and SAIL
terminology; the MIT equivalent is STY.

moon: n.

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1. A celestial object whose phase is very important to hackers. See
phase of the moon.

2. Dave Moon (MOON@MC).

line feed: n.

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[standard ASCII terminology]

1. v. To feed the paper through
a terminal by one line (in order to print on the next line).

2. n. The
“character” that causes the terminal to perform this
action.

Deleted before 2.1.5

[LISP] The now-standard way of writing LISP expressions as nested
lists, with parens and spaces; as opposed to the earlier and technically
purer practice of writing full S-expressions with cons dots. Supposedly
invented as a KLUGE because a full parser for S-expressions would have been
harder to write.

gateway: /gayt'way/, n.

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1. A computer or item of special-purpose hardware that links two or
more normally incompatible data networks and does protocol translation
between them.

2. On compatible or common-carrier networks, a piece of software
that translates between normally incompatible data formats and addressing
conventions.

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1. A program translator that allows human beings to generate machine
code using mnemonics and symbolic names for memory locations rather than
raw binary; distinguished from an HLL by the fact
that a single assembler step generally maps to a single machine instruction
(see also languages of choice).

2. A nanobot which is a physical
replicator (This is the `official' term, coined by
Eric Drexler; see nanotechnology).

binary: n.

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The object code for a program.

pointer arithmetic: n.

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[C programmers] The use of increment and decrement operations on
address pointers to traverse arrays or structure fields. See also
bump.

[obs.] Shuffling operation on the PDP-10 under some operating systems
that consumes a significant amount of computer time. See
BLT in the main listing.

BIN: n.

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[short for BINARY; used as a second file name on ITS]

1. n. Binary.

2. BIN FILE: A file containing
the BIN for a program. Usage: used at MIT, which runs on ITS. The
equivalent term at Stanford is DMP (pronounced "dump") FILE. Other names
used include SAV ("save") FILE (DEC and Tenex), SHR ("share") and LOW FILES
(DEC), and EXE ("ex'ee") FILE (DEC and Twenex). Also in this category are
the input files to the various flavors of linking loaders (LOADER, LINK-10,
STINK), called REL FILES.

cryonics: n.

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The practice of freezing oneself in hopes of being revived in the
future by cell-repair machines. A possible route to
technological immortality already taken by 1990 by more than a handful of
persons with terminal illnesses.

[ITS; UNIX calls this a daemon or
demon] A program similar to a
daemon, except that it doesn't sit around waiting
for something to happen, but is instead used by the system to perform
various useful tasks that just have to be done periodically. A typical
example would be an accounting program that accumulates statistics, keeps
track of who is logged in, and so on. Another example: most timesharing
systems have several terminals, and at any given time some are in use and
some are sitting idle; the idle ones usually sit there with some idiotic
message on their screens, such as “Logged off.”, from the last
time someone used it. The ITS timesharing system at MIT puts these idle
terminals to good use by displaying useful information on them, such as who
is using the computer, where they are, what they're doing, what their
telephone numbers are, and so on, along with other information such as
pretty pictures (the picture collection included a unicorn, Snoopy, and the
U.S.S. Enterprise from Star Trek). All this information was displayed on
idle terminals by the `name dragon', so called because it originally
printed just the names of the users. (That it now shows all kinds of
things, including useless though pretty pictures, is an example of
creeping featurism.) The name dragon is a program
started up by the system, and it runs about every five minutes and updates
the information on all idle terminals.

fuzz: n.

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In floating-point arithmetic, the maximum difference allowed between
two quantities for them to compare equal. Has to be set properly relative
to the FPU's precision limits. See fudge factor.
This term is particularly common among APL hackers.

JRN, JRL: n., /jay ahr en/, /jay ahr el/

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The names JRN and JRL were sometimes used as example names when
discussing PPNs (q.v.); they were understood to be programmer names for
(fictitious) programmers named “J. Random Nerd” and
“J. Random Loser” (see J. Random). For
example, one might say “To log in, type log one comma jay are
en” (that is, “[log1,JRN]”), and the listener will
understand that he should use his own computer id in place of
“[JRN]”.

IMPCOM: /imp'kom/

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See TELNET. This term is now nearly
obsolete.

JSYS: /jay'sis/, /jay'sigh/, v.

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[Jump to SYStem] See UUO.

output spy: n.

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On the ITS system there was a program that allowed you to see what
is being printed on someone else's terminal. It works by
“spying” on the other guy's output, by examining the insides
of the monitor system. It could do this because the MIT system purposely
had very little in the way of “protection” that prevents one
user from interfering with another. Fair is fair, however. There was
another program that would automatically notify you if anyone starts to spy
on your output. It worked in exactly the same way, by looking at the
insides of the operating system to see if anyone else was looking at the
insides that have to do with your output. This “counterspy”
program was called JEDGAR (pronounced as two syllables: /jed'gr/), in honor of the former head of
the FBI. By the way, the output spy program is called OS. Throughout the
rest of computer science, and also at IBM, OS means “operating
system”, but among old-time ITS hackers it almost always meant
“output spy”.

phantom: n.

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[Stanford] The SAIL equivalent of a dragon
Typical phantoms included the accounting program, the news-wire monitor,
and the LPT and XGP spoolers. UNIX and most other environments call this
sort of program a background demon or
daemon.

REL: /rel/

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See BIN: TOPS-10 is long dead. in the main
listing. Short for `relocatable', used on the old TOPS-10 OS.

SAV: /sayv/

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See BIN.

SHR: /sheir/

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See BIN.

STY: /stie/, not, /ess tee wie/, n.

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[ITS] A pseudo-teletype, which is a two-way pipeline with a job on
one end and a fake keyboard-tty on the other. Also, a standard program
which provides a pipeline from its controlling tty to a pseudo-teletype
(and thence to another tty, thereby providing a “sub-tty”).
This is MIT terminology; the SAIL, DEC and UNIX equivalent is PTY (see main
text).

UUO: /yoo-yoo-oh/, n.

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[short for “Un-Used Operation”] A PDP-10 system monitor
call. The term “Un-Used Operation” comes from the fact that,
on PDP-10 systems, monitor calls are implemented as invalid or illegal
machine instructions, which cause traps to the monitor (see
trap). The SAIL manual describing the available
UUOs has a cover picture showing an unidentified underwater object. See
YOYO. [Note: DEC
salescritters since decided that “Un-Used Operation” sounds
bad, so UUO now stands for “Unimplemented User Operation”.]
Tenex and Twenex systems use the JSYS machine instruction (q.v.), which is
halfway between a legal machine instruction and a UUO, since KA-10 Tenices
implement it as a hardware instruction which can be used as an ordinary
subroutine call (sort of a “pure JSR”).

XGP: /eks-jee-pee/

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history.

1. n. Xerox Graphics
Printer.

2. v. To print something on the
XGP. “You shouldn't XGP such a large file.”

yoyo: /yoh'yoh/, n.

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DEC service engineers' slang for
UUO. Usage: rare at Stanford and MIT, has been
found at random DEC installations.

Deleted before 2.5.1

A new release or version of a product, sufficiently different to
merit a new designation but including all the bugs and problems of the
previous product architecture (this is the usual result of being
“compatible” with previous releases).

go away: v.

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To vanish inexplicably. Normally used in a kind of prayer or litany:
“With a bit of luck, that problem will go away when we install
Release XXX”.

How hard would it be: adv.

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A plaintive litany used when venturing suggestions for changes.
Immediately precedes some preposterously difficult proposal which to the
requestor (and any other reasonable person) seems simple. From experienced
users, a wry acknowledgement that the proposition may well be costly, but
is nevertheless desirable. “How hard would it be to remove the
length restriction on userids?” See also
WIBNI.

IRP: v., /erp/

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[from the MIDAS pseudo-op which generates a block of code repeatedly,
substituting in various places the car and/or cdr of the list(s) supplied
at the IRP] To perform a series of tasks repeatedly with a minor
substitution each time through. “I guess I'll IRP over these
homework papers so I can give them some random grade for this
semester.”

layer: n.

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A collection of hardware or software that can be considered to form
a layer within the structure of an operating system or architecture.
Conceptually, layers are smoothly overlaid on each other with a clean
interface between each, as in an onion. Upon detailed inspection, however,
it will be often be seen that the tough-skinned and prickly globe artichoke
is often a more accurate model.

leading-edge: adj.

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1. At the forefront of innovation and technology.

2. Used in marketroid-speak to describe
technology that is four years out of date and is therefore mature enough to
be used in a commercial product.

organic debugging: n.

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[IBM] A parody of some fashionable techniques for improving the
quality of software. Reportedly, the output from a compilation or assembly
of the suspect program is placed on the floor, with a large flat dish on
top of it, and an indoor plant in a pot is placed in the centre of the
dish. The dish is then filled with water. The principle is that any bugs
in the program will be attracted towards the house plant and drown as they
try to cross the intervening water. From statistical evidence this seems
about as effective a technique as many others currently in use.

price/performance: n.

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An undefined measure of value-for-money. As in “The XYZ offers
improved price/performance”. See benchmark,
machoflops.

utility: n.

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A program that provides a general service that may have a variety of
uses. For example, sorting and printing programs are often called
utilities. The name implies a lack of novelty, and describes a
`bread-and-butter' program.

wait state: n.

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1. A period during which a processor is idle, for example, waiting
for input, output, or memory activity to complete.

2. Also used of humans waiting on some event to act.

Deleted before 2.6.1

[think of a dead fish] Down, and it stinks. Used of hardware which
suddenly stops working, especially when the stoppage
is ideally timed to disrupt a development schedule. Esp. found in the
phrase `to go belly up' or `gone belly up'. See also casters-up
mode. down.

black box: n.

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Something which is sealed off (opaque) so the inner workings aren't
visible, typically said of very complex algorithms. “That image
restoration technique is a black box.” The application to
hardware is general technical English, of
course.

bottleneck: adj.

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A slow code section, algorithm, or hardware subsystem through which
computation must pass (see also hot spot); anything
with lower bandwidth than is available for the rest
of the computation. A system is said to be
bottlenecked when performance is usually limited by
contention for one particular resource (such as disk, memory, or processor
clocks); the opposite condition is called
balanced, which is more jargon in the strict sense
and may be found in technical dictionaries.

The connection between the central processor and memory is often
called the von Neumann bottleneck. This term was
coined by John Backus in his 1978 Turing Award lecture; it is now standard
in the computer science literature but is also the canonical example of a
bottleneck to hackers.

2. adj. Of a delimiting
character, used at the right-hand end of a grouping. Used in such terms as
close parenthesis, close
bracket, etc.

3. vt. To release a file or communication channel after
access.

hot key

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1. n. A keystroke (or
combination of keystrokes) that switches environments; esp. used if it
flips between different modes or screens of a full-screen interface.
Perhaps so called because they are always active or `hot'; possibly related
to hot buttons in
marketroid-speak.

2. v. To switch
environments.

link: n.

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A network connection between two machines. Usage: “Is that
link down again?”

listing: n.

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A physical paper printout (as opposed to on-screen display) of
program source, or of the results (interspersed with error and status
messages) of a compilation or assembly run. What one grovels over when
performing a desk check. Both the term `listing'
and the thing it describes are now much less common than formerly, as
modern time-sharing operating systems and powerful interactive editors have
made it advantageous for hackers to do effectively all of their work
on-line.

mixed case: adj.

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Of source code, commentary, system messages, etc., not in all upper
case or all lower case, and therefore easy to read and understand. Used
esp. in opposition to older designs that are case-insensitive and use an
all-caps character set.

mount: vt.

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1. To attach a removable physical storage volume to a machine. In
elder days and on mainframes this verb was used almost exclusively of
tapes; nowadays it is more likely to refer to a disk or disk pack.

2. By extension, to attach any removable device such as a sensor,
robot arm, or meatware subsystem (see
scratch monkey).

3. [UNIX] To make a logical volume of some
sort available for use. The volume in question may or may not be removable
and may be just one partition of a physical device.

null device: n.

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[techspeak] A logical input/output device
connected to the bit bucket; when you write to it
nothing happens, when you read from it you see an end-of-file condition.
Useful for discarding unwanted output or using interactive programs in a
batch mode. See
/dev/null.

panic: vi.

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[UNIX] An action taken by a process or the entire operating system
when an unrecoverable error is discovered. The action usually consists of:
(1) displaying localized information on the controlling terminal, (2)
saving, or preparing for saving, a memory image of the process or operating
system, and (3) terminating the process or rebooting the system.

port

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1. v.,n. Describes the act of
moving, translating, reconfiguring, and adapting software from one machine
architecture and/or operating system (the source
environment) to run on a different one (the target
environment). Until recently and except among a relatively
small group of modern operating systems this process has ranged from
extremely painful up to flat-out impossible. The ubiquity of the C
language and the spread of the UNIX operating system have, fortunately,
done much to change this.

2. [from mainstream `port' for a door or gate] n. Anything one might plug a peripheral or
communications line into; as in a `serial port' or `parallel port'.

retrofit: v.

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To graft some pieces from newer technology onto a piece of software
or hardware representing an older one. This often results in a crocky,
inelegant compromise between new and old. The term implies use of the
older stuff in ways the designers didn't anticipate. Some of the bizarre
things done during the 1970s to old-style batch operating systems like
GECOS and IBM's OS/360 in order to make them crudely
interactive stand out as examples. More recently, personal computer
hackers have frequently been known to graft new floppy and hard-disk
devices onto obsolete hardware in order to preserve software written for a
particular processor, screen and keyboard combination.

sadistics: /s@-dis'tiks/, n.

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University slang for statistics and probability theory, often used
by hackers.

script: n.

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1. A program written in shell; a
batch file (see batch). A
set of instructions which can be fed to a machine as though the user had
typed them.

2. A transcript of some interaction with a machine.

SUPDUP: v.

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To communicate with another ARPAnet host using the SUPDUP program,
which is a SUPer-DUPer TELNET talking a special display protocol used
mostly in talking to ITS sites. Sometimes abbreviated to SD.

Deleted before 2.7.1

Incredibly dirty, greasy, or grubby. Anything which has been washed
within the last year is not really grungy. Also used metaphorically; hence
some programs (especially crocks) can be described as grungy.

The earliest print use anybody has reported to us of `grungy' is from
the National Lampoon parody Bored Of the Rings,
dating from the late 1960s. It has been suggested that this term
originated with Vietnam vets. It has recently (as of 1991) also become
common in mainstream English.

wow: n.

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See excl.

asymptotic: adj.

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Infinitely close to. This is used in a generalization of its
mathematical meaning to allege that something is within epsilon
of some standard, reference, or goal (see
epsilon).

bat file: n.

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[MS-DOS/Windows] Abbreviation for batch file,
the MSDOS equivalent of the UNIX shell script, derived from the .BAT
extension required for the command interpreter to find the batch file and
execute it.

sluggy: /sluhg'ee/, adj.

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Hackish variant of `sluggish'. Used only of people, esp. someone
just waking up after a long gronk out.

From the older (per-task) method of using secondary storage devices
to implement support for multitasking. Something which is
swapped in is available for immediate use in main
memory, and otherwise is swapped out. Often used
metaphorically to refer to people's memories (“I read the Scheme
Report every few months to keep the information swapped in.”) or to
their own availability (“I'll swap you in as soon as I finish looking
at this other problem.”). Compare page in,
page out.

what: n.

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The question mark character ("?"). See QUES. Usage: rare, used
particularly in conjunction with wow.

humongous: adj., /hyoo-mohng'gus/, alt. /hyoo-muhng'gus/

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See hungus.

Deleted before 2.9.[123456]

(alt.: 'blazer) Nickname for
any of the Telebit Trailblazers, a line of expensive but extremely reliable
and effective high-speed modems, popular at UNIX sites that pass large
volumes of email and USENET
news.

breakage

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1. Brokenness and the consequent mess.

2. [IBM] n. The extra people that must be added to an organization
because its master plan has changed; used esp.: of software and hardware
development teams.

FAtt: n.

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[FidoNet] Abbreviation for File
Attach.

firmware: n.

Software installed into a computer-based piece of equipment on ROM.
So-called because it's harder to change than software but easier than
hardware.

This was the output from the old UNIX V6 `1' command. The `1'
command then did a random number roll that gave it a one-in-ten chance of
recursively executing itself.

pipeline: n.

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[UNIX: orig. by Doug McIlroy; now also used under MS-DOS and
elsewhere] A chain of filter programs connected
`head-to-tail' so that the output of one becomes the input of the next.
Under UNIX, user utilities can often be implemented or at least prototyped
by a suitable collection of pipelines and temp-file grinding encapsulated
in a shell script (this is called plumbing); this is
much less effort than writing C every time, and the capability is
considered one of UNIX's major winning features.

Deleted before 2.9.12

Note

Most of these were removed due to my decision to drop IRC/MUD
slang of at best marginal interest to hackers and low giggle
or information value.

To flood a mailing list or newsgroup with huge amounts of useless,
trivial or redundant information. From the name of a hacker who has
frequently done this on some widely distributed mailing lists.

archive: n.

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1. A collection of several files bundled into one file by a program
such as
ar(1),
tar(1),
cpio(1),
or arc for shipment or archiving (sense 2). See
also tar and feather.

2. A collection of files or archives (sense 1) made available from
an archive site via
FTP or an email server.

arc wars: n.

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[primarily MSDOS] holy wars over which
archiving program one should use. The first arc war was sparked when
System Enhancement Associates (SEA) sued PKWare for copyright and trademark
infringement on its ARC program. PKWare's PKARC outperformed ARC on both
compression and speed while largely retaining compatibility (it introduced
a new compression type that could be disabled for backward-compatibility).
PKWare settled out of court to avoid enormous legal costs (both SEA and
PKWare are small companies); as part of the settlement, the name of PKARC
was changed to PKPAK. The public backlash against SEA for bringing suit
helped to hasten the demise of ARC as a standard when PKWare and others
introduced new, incompatible archivers with better compression
algorithms.

berserking: vi.

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A MUD term meaning to gain points
only by killing other players and mobiles (non-player
characters). Hence, a Berserker-Wizard is a player character that has
achieved enough points to become a wizard, but only by killing other
characters. Berserking is sometimes frowned upon because of its inherently
antisocial nature, but some MUDs have a berserker mode in which a player becomes
permanently berserk, can never flee from a fight,
cannot use magic, gets no score for treasure, but does get double kill
points. “Berserker wizards can seriously damage your elf!”

i14y: n.

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Abbrev. for ‘interoperability’, with the
‘14’ replacing fourteen letters. Used in the
X (windows) community. Refers to portability and
compatibility of data formats (even binary ones) between different programs
or implementations of the same program on different machines.

i18n: //, n.

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Abbrev. for `internationali{z,s}ation', with the 18 replacing 18
letters. Used in the X (windows) community.

lame: adj.

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Weak; losing; not up to the job. Hackish use resembles the
mainstream idiom in phrases like “a lame excuse” but has
special connotations. Some hacker subcultures use it for people or designs
that display intelligence but never follow through on their promise. Thus,
a lame design might have clever ideas in it, but fail due to laziness or
poor debugging on the part of the implementer. A lame person (or lamer) may be bright and interesting, but
unable to accomplish much due to chronic flakiness. Marked compounds like
‘non-lame’ and ‘lameitude’ flourish.

BartleMUD: /bar'tl-muhd/, n.

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Any of the MUDs derived from the original MUD game by Richard Bartle
and Roy Trubshaw (see MUD). BartleMUDs are noted
for their (usually slightly offbeat) humor, dry but friendly syntax, and
lack of adjectives in object descriptions, so a player is likely to come
across `brand172', for instance (see brand brand
brand). Bartle has taken a bad rap in some MUDding circles for
supposedly originating this term, but (like the story that MUD is a
trademark) this appears to be a myth; he uses `MUD1'.

posing: n.

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On a MUD, the use of : or
an equivalent command to announce to other players that one is taking a
certain physical action that has no effect on the game (it may, however,
serve as a social signal or propaganda device that induces other people to
take game actions). For example, if one's character name is Firechild, one
might type ‘: looks delighted at the idea and begins hacking on the
nearest terminal’ to broadcast a message that says “Firechild
looks delighted at the idea and begins hacking on the nearest
terminal”. See RL.

tinycrud: /ti:'nee-kruhd/, n.

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1. A pejorative used by habitues of older game-oriented
MUD versions for TinyMUDs and other user-extensible
MUD variants; esp.: common among users of the rather
violent and competitive AberMUD and MIST systems. These people justify the
slur on the basis of how (allegedly) inconsistent and lacking in genuine
atmosphere the scenarios generated in user extensible MUDs can be. Other
common knocks on them are that they feature little overall plot, bad game
topology, little competitive interaction, etc. --- not to mention the
alleged horrors of the TinyMUD code itself. This dispute is one of the MUD
world's hardiest perennial holy wars.

2. TinyMud-oriented chat on the USENET group rec.games.mud and elsewhere, especially
newbie questions and flamage.

K-line: v.

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[IRC] To ban a particular person from an IRC
server, usually for grossly bad netiquette. Comes
from the `K' code used to accomplish this in IRC's configuration
file.

Q-line: v.

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To ban a particular IRC server from
connecting to one's own; does to it what K-line does
to an individual. Since this is applied transitively, it has the effect of
partitioning the IRC network, which is generally a Bad
Thing.

reset: v.

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[the MUD community] In AberMUD, to bring all dead mobiles to life
and move items back to their initial starting places. New players who can't
find anything shout “Reset! Reset!” quite a bit. Higher-level
players shout back “No way!” since they know where points are
to be found. Used in RL, it means to put things
back to the way they were when you found them.

subshell: /suhb'shel/

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[UNIX, MS-DOS] An OS command interpreter (see
shell) spawned from within a program, such that exit
from the command interpreter returns one to the parent program in a state
that allows it to continue execution. Compare shell
out; oppose chain.

brand brand brand: n.

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Humorous catch-phrase from BartleMUDs, in
which players were described carrying a list of objects, the most common of
which would usually be a brand. Often used as a joke in talk
mode as in “Fred the wizard is here, carrying brand ruby
brand brand brand kettle broadsword flamethrower”. A brand is a
torch, of course; one burns up a lot of those exploring dungeons. Prob.:
influenced by the famous Monty Python Spam
skit.

fuggly: /fuhg'lee/, adj.

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Emphatic form of funky; funky + ugly).
Unusually for hacker jargon, this may actually derive from black
street-jive. To say it properly, the first syllable should be growled
rather than spoken. Usage: humorous. “Man, the
ASCII-to- EBCDIC code in that
printer driver is fuggly.” See also
wonky.

hack-and-slay: v.

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(also hack-and-slash)

1. To play a MUD or go mudding, especially
with the intention of berserking for pleasure.

2. To undertake an all-night programming/hacking session,
interspersed with stints of mudding as a change of pace. This term arose
on the British academic network amongst students who worked nights and
logged onto Essex University's MUDs during public-access hours (2 @sc{A.M.}
to 7 @sc{A.M.}). Usually more mudding than work was done in these
sessions.

arc: vt.

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[primarily MSDOS] To create a compressed archive from a group of
files using SEA ARC, PKWare PKARC, or a compatible program. Rapidly
becoming obsolete as the ARC compression method is falling into disuse,
having been replaced by newer compression techniques. See tar
and feather, zip.

A company that fabs chips to the designs of
others. As of the late 1980s, the combination of silicon foundries and
good computer-aided design software made it much easier for
hardware-designing startup companies to come into being. The downside of
using a silicon foundry is that the distance from the actual
chip-fabrication processes reduces designers' control of detail. This is
somewhat analogous to the use of HLLs versus coding
in assembler.

essentials: n.

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Things necessary to maintain a productive and secure hacking
environment. “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, a 300MHz Pentium box
with 64 meg of core and a 2-gigabyte disk running Linux with source and X
windows and Emacs and SLIP via a 56K modem to a friendly Internet site, and
thou.”

fab: /fab/, v.

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[from ‘fabricate’]

1. To produce actual silicon from a chip design. To a hacker,
fab is practically never short for
‘fabulous’.

2. fab line: the production
system (lithography, diffusion, etching, etc.:) for chips at a chip
manufacturer. Different fab lines
are run with different process parameters, die sizes, or technologies, or
simply to provide more manufacturing volume.

Deleted before 3.0.0

To repeat the body of a loop several times in succession. This
optimization technique reduces the number of times the loop-termination
test has to be executed. But it only works if the number of iterations
desired is a multiple of the number of repetitions of the body. Something
has to be done to take care of any leftover iterations --- such as
Duff's device.

Deleted before 3.2.0

Reportedy the default scratch file name among French-speaking
programmers --- in other words, a francophone foo.
It is reported that the phonetic mutations “titi”,
“tata”, and “tutu” canonically follow toto, analogously to
bar, baz and
quux in English.

unleaded: adj.

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Said of decaffeinated coffee, Diet Coke, and other imitation
programming fluids. “Do you want regular or
unleaded?” Appears to be widespread among programmers associated
with the oil industry in Texas (and probably elsewhere). Usage: silly, and
probably unintelligible to the next generation of hackers.

spoo: n.

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Variant of spooge, sense 1.

spooge: /spooj/

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ejaculate.

1. n. Inexplicable or arcane
code, or random and probably incorrect output from a computer
program.

Deleted before 3.3.2

[orig. in-house jargon at Symbolics] A manager. Compare
mangler. See also devo and
doco.

doco: /do'koh/, n.

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[orig. in-house jargon at Symbolics] A documentation writer. See
also devo and mango.

devo: /dee'voh/, n.

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[orig. in-house jargon at Symbolics] A person in a development
group. See also doco and
mango.

sendmail: n.

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The standard Unix mail agent; written by Eric Allman. It is very
flexible, but has very hairy configuration syntax
and has had numerous security bugs, because it's a large, monolithic
program which needs assume with root privileges part of the time. See also
bug-of-the-month club and Great
Worm.

Used to describe married couples in which both partners work for
Digital Equipment Corporation.

Open DeathTrap: n.

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interesting.

Abusive hackerism for the Santa Cruz Operation's `Open DeskTop'
product, a Motif-based graphical interface over their Unix. The funniest
part is that this was coined by SCO's own developers.... Compare
AIDX, MacintrashNominal Semidestructor,
ScumOS, sun-stools,
HP-SUX.

microtape: /mi:'kroh-tayp/, n.

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Occasionally used to mean a DECtape, as opposed to a
macrotape. A DECtape is a small reel, about 4
inches in diameter, of magnetic tape about an inch wide. Unlike those for
today's macrotapes, microtape drivers allowed random
access to the data, and therefore could be used to support file systems and
even for swapping (this was generally done purely for hack
value, as they were far too slow for practical use). In their
heyday they were used in pretty much the same ways one would now use a
floppy disk: as a small, portable way to save and transport files and
programs. Apparently the term microtape was actually the official term used
within DEC for these tapes until someone coined the word
‘DECtape’, which, of course, sounded sexier to the
marketroids; another version of the story holds that
someone discovered a conflict with another company's
‘microtape’ trademark.

pig, run like a: v.

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To run very slowly on given hardware, said of software. Distinct
from hog.

altmode: n.,obs.

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Syn. alt sense 3. Old
DEC terminology, now historical only.

AOS

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1. /aws/ (East Coast),
/ay'os/ (West Coast) vt. obs. To increase the amount of
something. “AOS the campfire.” [based on a PDP-10 increment
instruction] Usage: considered silly, and now obsolete. Now largely
supplanted by bump. See SOS.

2. n. A
Multics-derived OS supported at one time by Data
General. This was pronounced /A-O-S/ or /A-os/. A spoof of the standard AOS system
administrator's manual (How to Load and Generate your AOS
System) was created, issued a part number, and circulated as
photocopy folklore; it was called How to Goad and Levitate your
CHAOS System.

3. n. Algebraic Operating
System, in reference to those calculators which use infix instead of
postfix (reverse Polish) notation.

4. A BSD-like operating system for the IBM
RT.

Historical note: AOS in sense 1 was the name of a
PDP-10 instruction that took any memory location in
the computer and added 1 to it; AOS meant `Add One and do not Skip'. Why,
you may ask, does the `S' stand for `do not Skip' rather than for `Skip'?
Ah, here was a beloved piece of PDP-10 folklore. There were eight such
instructions: AOSE added 1 and then skipped the next instruction if the
result was Equal to zero; AOSG added 1 and then skipped if the result was
Greater than 0; AOSN added 1 and then skipped if the result was Not 0; AOSA
added 1 and then skipped Always; and so on. Just plain AOS didn't say when
to skip, so it never skipped.

For similar reasons, AOJ meant `Add One and do not Jump'. Even more
bizarre, SKIP meant `do not SKIP'! If you wanted to skip the next
instruction, you had to say `SKIPA'. Likewise, JUMP meant `do not JUMP';
the unconditional form was JUMPA. However, hackers never did this. By
some quirk of the 10's design, the JRST (Jump and
ReSTore flag with no flag specified) was actually faster and so was
invariably used. Such were the perverse mysteries of assembler
programming.

chine nual: /sheen'yu-@l/, n. obs.

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[MIT] The LISP Machine Manual, so called because the title was
wrapped around the cover so only those letters showed on the front.

blow away: vt.

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To remove (files and directories) from permanent storage, usually by
accident. “He reformatted the wrong partition and blew away last
night's netnews”. Oppose nuke.

cruncha cruncha cruncha: /kruhn'ch@ kruhn'ch@ kruhn'ch@/, interj.

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An encouragement sometimes muttered to a machine bogged down in a
serious grovel. Also describes a notional sound
made by groveling hardware. See wugga wugga,
grind (sense 3).

CTY: /sit'ee/, /C-T-Y/, n.

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[MIT] The terminal physically associated with a computer's system
console. The term is a contraction of `Console
tty', that is, `Console TeleTYpe'. This
ITS- and TOPS-10-associated
term has become less common, as most Unix hackers simply refer to the CTY
as ‘the console’.

JRST: /jerst/, v.

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[based on the PDP-10 jump instruction] To suddenly change subjects,
with no intention of returning to the previous topic.. Usage: rather rare,
and considered silly. “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick; Jack jrst over
the candle stick.” This is even sillier. Why JRST and not JUMP?
The PDP-10 JUMP instruction means “do not jump”, as explained
in the definition of AOS. The JUMPA instruction (“JUMP
Always”) does jump, but it isn't quite as fast as the JRST
instruction (Jump and ReSTore flags). The instruction was used so
frequently that the speed matters, so all PDP-10 hackers automatically used
the faster though more obscure JRST instruction.

news: n.

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See netnews.

fepped out: /fept owt/, adj.

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The Symbolics 3600 LISP Machine has a Front-End Processor called a
`FEP' (compare sense 2 of box). When the main
processor gets wedged, the FEP takes control of the
keyboard and screen. Such a machine is said to have fepped out or dropped into the fep.

JFCL: /jif'kl/, /jaf'kl/, /j@-fi'kl/

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(alt. jfcl) To cancel or
annul something. “Why don't you jfcl that out?” The fastest
do-nothing instruction on older models of the PDP-10 happened to be JFCL,
which stands for “Jump if Flag set and then CLear the flag”;
this does something useful, but is a very fast no-operation if no flag is
specified. Geoff Goodfellow, one of the Steele-1983 co-authors, had JFCL
on the license plate of his BMW for years. Usage: rare except among
old-time PDP-10 hackers.

PIP: /pip/

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[Peripheral Interchange Program] To copy; from the program PIP on
CP/M, RSX-11, RSTS/E, TOPS-10, and OS/8 (derived from a utility on the
PDP-6) that was used for file copying (and in OS/8 and RT-11 for just about
every other file operation you might want to do). It is said that when the
program was originated, during the development of the PDP-6 in 1963, it was
called ATLATL (`Anything, Lord, to Anything, Lord'; this played on the
Nahuatl word atlatl for a spear-thrower,
with connotations of utility and primitivity that were no doubt quite
intentional). See also BLT,
dd, cat.

NOMEX underwear: /noh'meks uhn'-der-weir/, n.

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[Usenet] Syn. asbestos longjohns, used
mostly in auto-related mailing lists and newsgroups. NOMEX underwear is an
actual product available on the racing equipment market, used as a fire
resistance measure and required in some racing series.

Pink-Shirt Book

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The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM
PC. The original cover featured a picture of Peter Norton with
a silly smirk on his face, wearing a pink shirt. Perhaps in recognition of
this usage, the current edition has a different picture of Norton wearing a
pink shirt. See also book titles.

[from the LaTeX command] With \end, used humorously in writing to
indicate a context or to remark on the surrounded text. For
example:

\begin{flame}
Predicate logic is the only good programming
language. Anyone who would use anything else
is an idiot. Also, all computers should be
tredecimal instead of binary.
\end{flame}

The Scribe users at CMU and elsewhere used to use @Begin/@End in an
identical way (LaTeX was built to resemble Scribe). On Usenet, this
construct would more frequently be rendered as <FLAME ON> and <FLAME
OFF>, or #ifdef FLAME and
#endif FLAME. Recently the pseudo-HTML
form <flame> ... </flame> has
become popular.

<bobbit>: n.

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[Usenet: alt.folklore.urban and elsewhere] Commonly
used as a placeholder for omitted text in a followup message (not copying
the whole parent message is considered good form). Refers, of course, to
the celebrated mutilation of John Bobbitt.

JR[LN]: /J-R-L/, /J-R-N/, n.

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The names JRL and JRN were sometimes used as example names when
discussing a kind of user ID used under TOPS-10 and
WAITS; they were understood to be the initials of
(fictitious) programmers named `J. Random Loser' and `J. Random Nerd' (see
J. Random). For example, if one said “To log
in, type log one comma jay are en” (that is, “log
1,JRN”), the listener would have understood that he should use his
own computer ID in place of `JRN'.

Deleted before 4.3.0

1. One who eats (computer) bugs for a living. One who fulfills all
the dreariest negative stereotypes about hackers: an asocial, malodorous,
pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater. Cannot
be used by outsiders without implied insult to all hackers; compare
black-on-black vs. white-on-black usage of ‘nigger’. A
computer geek may be either a fundamentally clueless individual or a
proto-hacker in larval stage. Also called turbo nerd, turbo
geek. See also propeller head,
clustergeeking, geek out,
wannabee, terminal junkie,
spod, weenie.

2. Many self-described computer geeks use this term in a positive
sense and protest sense 1; this seems to have been a post-1990 development
which really started to gather steam after 1998. For one such argument,
see http://www.darkwater.com/omni/geek.html. See
also geek code.

[from the television series Dr. Who]
Computations so fiendishly subtle and complex that they could not be
performed by machines. Used to refer to any task that should be
expressible as an algorithm in theory, but isn't. (The Z80's LDIR
instruction, “Computed Block Transfer with increment”, may
also be relevant.)

bodysurf code: n.

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A program or segment of code written quickly in the heat of
inspiration without the benefit of formal design or deep thought. Like its
namesake sport, the result is too often a wipeout that leaves the
programmer eating sand.

bot spot: n.

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[MUD] The user on a MUD with the longest connect time. Derives from
the fact that bots on MUDs often stay constantly
connected and appear at the bottom of the list.

branch to Fishkill: n.

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[IBM: from the location of one of the corporation's facilities] Any
unexpected jump in a program that produces catastrophic or just plain weird
results. See jump off into never-never land,
hyperspace.

digit: n.,obs.

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An employee of Digital Equipment Corporation. See also
VAX, VMS,
PDP-10, TOPS-10,
field circus.

DPB: /d@-pib'/, vt.

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[from the PDP-10 instruction set] To plop something down in the
middle. Usage: silly. “DPB yourself into that couch there.”
The connotation would be that the couch is full except for one slot just
big enough for one last person to sit in. DPB means `DePosit Byte', and
was the name of a PDP-10 instruction that inserts some bits into the middle
of some other bits. Hackish usage has been kept alive by the Common LISP
function of the same name.

gaseous: adj.

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Deserving of being gassed. Disseminated by
Geoff Goodfellow while at SRI; became particularly popular after the
Moscone-Milk killings in San Francisco, when it was learned that the
defendant Dan White (a politician who had supported Proposition 7) would
get the gas chamber under Proposition 7 if convicted of first-degree murder
(he was eventually convicted of manslaughter).

laundromat: n.

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Syn. disk farm; see washing
machine.

Missed'em-five: n.

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Pejorative hackerism for AT&T System V Unix, generally used by
BSD partisans in a bigoted mood. (The synonym
`SysVile' is also encountered.) See software bloat,
Berzerkeley.

NetBOLLIX: n.

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[from bollix: to bungle, or British ‘bollocks’]
IBM's NetBIOS, an extremely
brain-damaged network protocol that, like
Blue Glue, is used at commercial shops that don't
know any better.

Pangloss parity: n.

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[from Dr. Pangloss, the eternal optimist in Voltaire's
Candide] In corporate DP shops, a common condition
of severe but equally shared lossage resulting from
the theory that as long as everyone in the organization has the exactly the
same model of obsolete computer, everything will be
fine.

plingnet: /pling'net/, n.

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Syn. UUCPNET. Also see
Commonwealth Hackish, which uses ‘pling’
for bang (as in bang
path).

pnambic: /p@-nam'bik/

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[Acronym from the scene in the film version of The Wizard
of Oz in which the true nature of the wizard is first
discovered: “Pay no attention to the man behind the
curtain.”]

A stage of development of a process or function that, owing to
incomplete implementation or to the complexity of the system, requires
human interaction to simulate or replace some or all of the actions,
inputs, or outputs of the process or function.

2. Of or pertaining to a process or function whose apparent
operations are wholly or partially falsified.

3. Requiring prestidigitization.

The ultimate pnambic product was “Dan Bricklin's Demo”,
a program which supported flashy user-interface design prototyping. There
is a related maxim among hackers: “Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.” See
magic, sense 1, for illumination of this
point.

snivitz: /sniv'itz/, n.

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A hiccup in hardware or software; a small, transient problem of
unknown origin (less serious than a snark). Compare
glitch.

twonkie: /twon'kee/, n.

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The software equivalent of a Twinkie (a variety of sugar-loaded junk
food, or (in gay slang with a small t) the male equivalent of
‘chick’); a useless ‘feature’ added to look sexy
and placate a marketroid (compare
Saturday-night special). The term may also be
related to The Twonky, title menace of a classic SF
short story by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore), first
published in the September 1942 Astounding Science
Fiction and subsequently much anthologized.

whalesong: n.

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The peculiar clicking and whooshing sounds made by a PEP modem such
as the Telebit Trailblazer as it tries to synchronize with another PEP
modem for their special high-speed mode. This sound isn't anything like
the normal two-tone handshake between conventional V-series modems and is
instantly recognizable to anyone who has heard it more than once. It
sounds, in fact, very much like whale songs. This noise is also called
“the moose call” or “moose tones”.

'Snooze: /snooz/, n.

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Fidonews, the weekly official on-line newsletter of FidoNet. As the
editorial policy of Fidonews is “anything that arrives, we
print”, there are often large articles completely unrelated to
FidoNet, which in turn tend to elicit flamage in
subsequent issues.

TechRef: /tek'ref/, n.

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[MS-DOS] The original IBM PC Technical Reference
Manual, including the BIOS listing and complete schematics for
the PC. The only PC documentation in the original-issue package that was
considered serious by real hackers.

TELNET: /tel'net/, vt.

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(also commonly lowercased as telnet) To communicate with another Internet
host using the TELNET (RFC 854) protocol (usually
using a program of the same name). TOPS-10 people used the word IMPCOM,
since that was the program name for them. Sometimes abbreviated to TN
/T-N/. “I usually TN over
to SAIL just to read the AP News.”

USG Unix: /U-S-G yoo'niks/, n.,obs.

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Refers to AT&T Unix commercial versions after Version
7, especially System III and System V releases 1, 2, and 3. So
called because during most of the life­span of those versions
AT&T's support crew was called the `Unix Support Group', but it is
applied to version that pre- and post-dated the USG group but were of the
same lineage. This term is now historical. See
BSD, Unix.

SysVile: /sis-vi:l'/, n.

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See Missed'em-five.

moose call: n.

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See whalesong.

mouse around: vi.

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To explore public portions of a large system, esp.: a network such
as Internet via FTP or telnet, looking for
interesting stuff to snarf.

Deleted before 4.3.2

[from 120 volts, U.S. wall voltage] To cycle power on a machine in
order to reset or unjam it. Compare Big Red Switch,
power cycle.

Black Thursday: n.

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repeal

February 8th, 1996 -- the day of the signing into law of the
CDA, so called by analogy with the catastrophic
“Black Friday” in 1929 that began the Great Depression.

POPJ: /pop'J/, n.,v.

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[from a PDP-10 return-from-subroutine
instruction] To return from a digression. By verb doubling, “Popj,
popj” means roughly “Now let's see, where were we?” See
RTI.

Internet address: n.

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1. [techspeak] An absolute network address of the form foo@bar.baz, where foo is a user name, bar is
a sitename, and baz is a domain name, possibly including periods itself.
Contrast with bang path; see also the
network and network address. All
Internet machines and most UUCP sites can now resolve these addresses,
thanks to a large amount of behind-the-scenes magic and
PD software written since 1980 or so. See also
bang path, domainist.

2. More loosely, any network address reachable through Internet;
this includes bang path addresses and some internal
corporate and government networks.

Reading Internet addresses is something of an art. Here are the four
most important top-level functional Internet domains followed by a
selection of geographical domains:

com

commercial organizations

edu

educational institutions

gov

U.S. government civilian sites

mil

U.S. military sites

Note that most of the sites in the com
and edu domains are in the U.S. or
Canada.

us

sites in the U.S. outside the functional domains

su

sites in the ex-Soviet Union (see kremvax).

uk

sites in the United Kingdom

Within the us domain, there
are subdomains for the fifty states, each generally with a name identical
to the state's postal abbreviation. Within the uk domain, there is an ac subdomain for academic sites and a
co domain for commercial ones.
Other top-level domains may be divided up in similar ways.

wallpaper: n.

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1. A file containing a listing (e.g., assembly listing) or a
transcript, esp.: a file containing a transcript of all or part of a login
session. (The idea was that the paper for such listings was essentially
good only for wallpaper, as evidenced at Stanford, where it was used to
cover windows.) Now rare, esp.: since other systems have developed other
terms for it (e.g., PHOTO on TWENEX). However, the Unix world doesn't have
an equivalent term, so perhaps wallpaper will take
hold there. The term probably originated on ITS, where the commands to
begin and end transcript files were :WALBEG
and :WALEND, with default file WALL PAPER (the space was a path delimiter).

2. The background pattern used on graphical workstations (this is
techspeak under the ‘Windows’ graphical user interface to
MS-DOS).

3. wallpaper filen. The file that contains the wallpaper
information before it is actually printed on paper. (Even if you don't
intend ever to produce a real paper copy of the file, it is still called a
wallpaper file.)

interrupt list: n.

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[MS-DOS] The list of all known software interrupt calls (both
documented and undocumented) for IBM PCs and compatibles, maintained and
made available for free redistribution by Ralf Brown
@email{<ralf@cs.cmu.edu>}. As of late 1992, it had grown to
approximately two megabytes in length.

bum

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1. vt. To make highly efficient,
either in time or space, often at the expense of clarity. “I managed
to bum three more instructions out of that code.” “I spent
half the night bumming the interrupt code.” In 1996, this term and
the practice it describes are semi-obsolete. In elder
days, John McCarthy (inventor of LISP)
used to compare some efficiency-obsessed hackers among his students to
“ski bums”; thus, optimization became “program
bumming”, and eventually just “bumming”. 2. To squeeze
out excess; to remove something in order to improve whatever it was removed
from (without changing function; this distinguishes the process from a
featurectomy). 3. n. A small change to an algorithm, program, or
hardware device to make it more efficient. “This hardware bum makes
the jump instruction faster.” Usage: now uncommon, largely
superseded by v.tune (and n.tweak, hack), though none of
these exactly capture sense

2. All these uses are rare in Commonwealth hackish, because in the
parent dialects of English the noun ‘bum’ is a rude synonym for
‘buttocks’ and the verb ‘bum’ for buggery.

Deleted before 4.3.3

[MS-DOS] Of a TSR (terminate-and-stay-resident) IBM PC program, such
as the N pop-up calendar and calculator
utilities that circulate on BBS systems: unsociable.
Used to describe a program that rudely steals the resources that it needs
without considering that other TSRs may also be resident. One particularly
common form of rudeness is lock-up due to programs fighting over the
keyboard interrupt. See rude, also
mess-dos.

1. A combination of a “project identifier” and
“programmer name”, used to identify a specific file directory
belonging to that programmer. This was used in the TOPS-10 operating
system that DEC provided for the PDP-10. The
implicit assumption is that there will be many projects, each with several
programmers working on it, and that a programmer may work on several
projects. This is not a bad organization; what was totally
bogus is that projects and programmers were
identified by octal (base eight) numbers! Hence the term
Project-Programmer Number, or PPN. If you were programmer 72534 and wanted
to work on project 306, you would have had to tell the computer
“login 306,72534”. This was absurd. At CMU the TOPS-10
system was modified to be somewhat less ridiculous: projects were
identified by a letter and three decimal (not octal) digits, and
programmers were identified by his two initials, a digit indicating the
first year he came to CMU, and a fourth character that is used to
distinguish between, say, Fred Loser and Farley Luser who both happened to
arrive the same year. So to use the PDP-10 at CMU one might have said
“login A780GS70”. The programmer name “GS70” was
also called a “man number” at CMU, even though it isn't really
a number. At Stanford, projects and programmers were identified by three
letters or digits each: if Guy Steele werre to work on a LISP project at
Stanford, he might log in as “login lsp,gls”. This was much
more mnemonic. Programmer identifiers at Stanford were usually the
programmer's initials, though sometimes it is a nickname or other
three-letter sequence. Even though the CMU and Stanford forms were not
really (pairs of) numbers, the term PPN was used to refer to the
combination.

2. At Stanford, the term PPN was often used loosely to refer to the
programmer name alone. “I want to send you some mail; what's your
ppn?.” This term is still used by old-timers on the commercial
time-sharing service CompuServe (which uses PDP-10s) but has long since
vanished from hackerdom. ITS and UNIX, of course, never used PPNs; ITS had
six-character UNAMEs, and UNIX has 8 or 15-character `usernames' and a
hierarchical file system rather than project areas.

gurfle: /ger'fl/, interj.

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Google

An expression of shocked disbelief. “He said we have to
recode this thing in FORTRAN by next week. Gurfle!” Compare
weeble.

cycle drought: n.

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A scarcity of cycles. It may be due to a cycle
crunch, but it could also occur because part of the computer is
temporarily not working, leaving fewer cycles to go around. “The
high moby is down, so we're
running with only half the usual amount of memory. There will be a cycle
drought until it's fixed.”

dup loop: /d[y]oop loop/, dupe loop, n.

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[FidoNet] An infinite stream of duplicated, near-identical messages
on a FidoNet echo, the only difference being unique
or mangled identification information applied by a faulty or incorrectly
configured system or network gateway, thus rendering dup
killers ineffective. If such a duplicate message eventually
reaches a system through which it has already passed (with the original
identification information), all systems passed on the way back to that
system are said to be involved in a dup loop.

Nominal Semidestructor: n.

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interesting.

Soundalike slang for ‘National Semiconductor’, found
among other places in the Networking/2 networking sources. During the late
1970s to mid-1980s this company marketed a series of microprocessors
including the NS16000 and NS32000 and several variants. At one point early
in the great microprocessor race, the specs on these chips made them look
like serious competition for the rising Intel 80x86 and Motorola 680x0
series. Unfortunately, the actual parts were notoriously flaky and never
implemented the full instruction set promised in their literature,
apparently because the company couldn't get any of the mask steppings to
work as designed. They eventually sank without trace, joining the Zilog
Z8000 and a few even more obscure also-rans in the graveyard of forgotten
microprocessors. Compare HP-SUX,
AIDX, buglix,
Macintrash, Telerat,
ScumOS, sun-stools,
Slowlaris, Internet
Exploder.

acolyte: n. obs.

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rooms.

[TMRC] An OSU privileged enough to submit
data and programs to a member of the
priesthood.

Ada: n.

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Deleted: Ada is so dead in 2002. No point in fighting old
wars.

A Pascal-descended language that was at one
time made mandatory for Department of Defense software projects by the
Pentagon. Hackers are nearly unanimous in observing that, technically, it
is precisely what one might expect given that kind of endorsement by fiat;
bloated, crockish, difficult to use, and overall a disastrous,
multi-billion-dollar boondoggle (one common description was “The PL/I
of the 1980s”). The kindest thing that has been said about it is
that there is probably a good small language screaming to get out from
inside its vast, elephantine bulk.

Nowadays we say this of Ada.

AIDS: /aydz/, n.

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Deleted: this slang is as dead as the floppy
disk.

Short for A* Infected Disk Syndrome (`A*' is a
glob pattern that matches, but is not limited to,
Apple or Amiga), this condition is quite often the result of practicing
unsafe SEX. See virus,
worm, Trojan horse,
virgin.

AIDX: /ayd'k@z/, n.

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Linux won.

Derogatory term for IBM's perverted version of Unix, AIX, especially
for the AIX 3.? used in the IBM RS/6000 series (some hackers think it is
funnier just to pronounce “AIX” as “aches”). A
victim of the dreaded “hybridism” disease, this attempt to
combine the two main currents of the Unix stream
(BSD and USG Unix) became a
monstrosity to haunt system administrators' dreams.
For example, if new accounts are created while many users are logged on,
the load average jumps quickly over 20 due to silly implementation of the
user databases. For a quite similar disease, compare
HP-SUX. Also, compare
Macintrash, ScumOS,
sun-stools.

amoeba: n.

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Humorous term for the Commodore Amiga personal computer.

ANSI: /an'see/

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1. n. [techspeak] The American
National Standards Institute. ANSI, along with the International
Organization for Standards (ISO), standardized the C programming language
(see K&R, Classic C), and
promulgates many other important software standards.

2. n. [techspeak] A terminal may
be said to be `ANSI' if it meets the ANSI X3.64 standard for terminal
control. Unfortunately, this standard was both over-complicated and too
permissive. It has been retired and replaced by the ECMA-48 standard,
which shares both flaws.

3. n. [BBS jargon] The set of
screen-painting codes that most MS-DOS/Windows and Amiga computers accept.
This comes from the ANSI.SYS device driver that had to be loaded on an
MS-DOS computer to view such codes. Unfortunately, neither DOS ANSI nor
the BBS ANSIs derived from it exactly match the ANSI X3.64 terminal
standard. For example, the ESC-[1m code turns on the bold highlight on
large machines, but in IBM PC/MS-DOS ANSI, it turns on `intense' (bright)
colors. Also, in BBS-land, the term `ANSI' is often used to imply that a
particular computer uses or can emulate the IBM high-half character set
from MS-DOS/Windows. Particular use depends on context. Occasionally, the
vanilla ASCII character set is used with the color codes, but on BBSs, ANSI
and `IBM characters' tend to go together.

backspace and overstrike: interj.

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[rare] Whoa! Back up. Used to suggest that someone just said or
did something wrong. Once common among APL programmers; may now be
obsolete.

banana label: n.

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The labels often used on the sides of
macrotape reels, so called because they are shaped
roughly like blunt-ended bananas. This term, like macrotapes themselves,
is still current but visibly headed for obsolescence.

baud barf: /bawd barf/, n.

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The garbage one gets on a terminal (or terminal emulator) when using
a modem connection with some protocol setting (esp.: line speed) incorrect,
or when someone picks up a voice extension on the same line, or when really
bad line noise disrupts the connection. Baud barf is not completely
random, by the way; hackers with a lot of
serial-line experience can usually tell whether the device at the other end
is expecting a higher or lower speed than the terminal is set to.
Really experienced ones can identify particular
speeds.

[contraction of `Berkeley Unix'] See BSD.
Not used at Berkeley itself. May be more common among
suits attempting to sound like cognoscenti than
among hackers, who usually just say `BSD'.

BITNET: /bit'net/, n., obs.

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[acronym: Because It's Time NETwork] Everybody's least favorite
piece of the network (see the network) -- until AOL
happened. The BITNET hosts were a collection of IBM dinosaurs and VAXen
(the latter with lobotomized comm hardware) that communicated using
80-character EBCDIC card images (see
eighty-column mind); thus, they tended to mangle the
headers and text of third-party traffic from the rest of the
ASCII/RFC-822 world with annoying regularity.
BITNET was also notorious as the apparent home of
B1FF. By 1995 it had, much to everyone's relief,
been obsolesced and absorbed into the Internet. Unfortunately, around this
time we also got AOL.

To use a navigator or off-line message reader to minimize time spent
on-line to a commercial network service (a necessity in many places outside
the U.S. where the telecoms monopolies charge per-minute for local calls).
This term attained wide use in the UK, but is rare or unknown in the
US.

buglix: /buhg'liks/, n.

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[uncommon] Pejorative term referring to DEC's
ULTRIX operating system in its earlier severely buggy
versions. Still used to describe ULTRIX, but without nearly so much venom.
Compare AIDX, HP-SUX,
Telerat, sun-stools.

can: vt.

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To abort a job on a time-sharing system. Used esp.: when the person
doing the deed is an operator, as in “canned from the
console”. Frequently used in an imperative
sense, as in “Can that print job, the LPT just popped a
sprocket!” Synonymous with gun. It is said
that the ASCII character with mnemonic CAN (0011000) was used as a kill-job
character on some early OSes, but this is more likely to be short for
cancel. Alternatively, this term may
derive from mainstream slang ‘canned’ for being laid off or
fired.

card walloper: n.

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An EDP programmer who grinds out batch programs that do stupid
things like print people's paychecks. Compare code
grinder. See also punched card,
eighty-column mind.

corge: /korj/, n.

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[originally, the name of a cat] Yet another metasyntactic
variable, invented by Mike Gallaher and propagated by the
GOSMACS documentation. See
grault.

cray instability: n.

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1. A shortcoming of a program or algorithm that manifests itself
only when a large problem is being run on a powerful machine (see
cray). Generally more subtle than bugs that can be
detected in smaller problems running on a workstation or mini.

2. More specifically, a shortcoming of algorithms which are well
behaved when run on gentle floating point hardware (such as IEEE-standard
or PDP-series machines) but which break down badly when exposed to a Cray's
unique `rounding' rules.

crayola: /kray-oh'l@/, n.

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A super-mini or -micro computer that provides some reasonable
percentage of supercomputer performance for an unreasonably low price.
Might also be a killer micro.

crayon: n.

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1. Someone who works on Cray supercomputers. More specifically, it
implies a programmer, probably of the CDC ilk, probably male, and almost
certainly wearing a tie (irrespective of gender). Systems types who have a
Unix background tend not to be described as crayons.

2. Formerly, anyone who worked for Cray Research; since the buyout
by SGI, anyone they inherited from Cray. Nowadays, often applied to any SGI
employee who either works at one of the former Cray Research facilities
(i.e. Eagan Minnesota and Chippewa Falls Wisconsin) or works primarily in
vector computing aspects of the business. Sometimes considered mildly
offensive by those to whom it is applied, particularly those whose work has
nothing to do with vector computing.

3. A computron (sense 2) that participates
only in number-crunching.

4. A unit of computational power equal to that of a single Cray-1.
There is a standard joke about this usage that derives from an old Crayola
crayon promotional gimmick: When you buy 64 crayons you get a free
sharpener.

A situation wherein the number of people trying to use a computer
simultaneously has reached the point where no one can get enough cycles
because they are spread too thin and the system has probably begun to
thrash. This scenario is an inevitable result of
Parkinson's Law applied to timesharing. Usually the only solution is to
buy more computer. Happily, this has rapidly become easier since the
mid-1980s, so much so that the very term `cycle crunch' now has a faintly
archaic flavor; most hackers now use workstations or personal computers as
opposed to traditional timesharing systems, and are far more likely to
complain of `bandwidth crunch' on their shared networks rather than cycle
crunch.

D. C. Power Lab: n.

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The former site of SAIL. Hackers thought
this was very funny because the obvious connection to electrical
engineering was nonexistent — the lab was named for a Donald
C. Power.

dead link: n.

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[very common] A World-Wide-Web URL that no longer points to the
information it was written to reach. Usually this happens because the
document has been moved or deleted. Lots of dead links make a WWW page
frustrating and useless and are the #1 sign of poor page
maintainance. Compare dangling pointer,
link rot.

cray: /kray/, n.

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1. (properly, capitalized) One of the line of supercomputers
designed by Cray Research.

2. Any supercomputer at all.

3. The canonicalnumber-crunching machine.

The term is actually the lowercased last name of Seymour Cray, a
noted computer architect and co-founder of the company. Numerous vivid
legends surround him, some true and some admittedly invented by Cray
Research brass to shape their corporate culture and image.

domainist: /doh-mayn'ist/, adj.

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1. [Usenet, by pointed analogy with “sexist”,
“racist”, etc.] Someone who judges people by the domain of
their email addresses; esp. someone who dismisses anyone who posts from a
public internet provider. “What do you expect from an article posted
from aol.com?”

2. Said of an Internet address (as opposed to a bang
path) because the part to the right of the @
specifies a nested series of domains;
for example, @email{esr@snark.thyrsus.com} specifies the machine called
snark in the subdomain called
thyrsus within the top-level
domain called com. See also
big-endian, sense 2.

The meaning of this term has drifted. At one time sense 2 was
primary. In elder days it was also used of a site, mailer, or routing
program which knew how to handle domainist addresses; or of a person (esp.:
a site admin) who preferred domain addressing, supported a domainist
mailer, or proselytized for domainist addressing and disdained
bang paths. These senses are now (1996) obsolete,
as effectively all sites have converted.

donuts: n

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[obs.] A collective noun for any set of memory bits. This usage is
extremely archaic and may no longer be live jargon; it dates from the days
of ferrite-core memories in which each bit was
implemented by a doughnut-shaped magnetic flip-flop.

dup killer: /d[y]oop kill'r/, n.

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[FidoNet] Software that is supposed to detect and delete duplicates
of a message that may have reached the FidoNet system via different
routes.

earthquake: n.

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[IBM] The ultimate real-world shock test for computer hardware.
Hackish sources at IBM deny the rumor that the Bay Area quake of 1989 was
initiated by the company to test quality-assurance procedures at its
California plants.

farming: n.

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[Adelaide University, Australia] What the heads of a disk drive are
said to do when they plow little furrows in the magnetic media. Associated
with a crash. Typically used as follows: “Oh
no, the machine has just crashed; I hope the hard drive hasn't gone
farming again.” Now rare; modern drives
automatically park their heads in a safe zone on power-down, so it takes a
real mechanical problem to induce this.

Fight-o-net: n.

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[FidoNet] Deliberate distortion of FidoNet,
often applied after a flurry of flamage in a
particular echo, especially the SYSOP echo or
Fidonews.

File Attach:

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1. n. A file sent along with a
mail message from one FidoNet to another.

2. vt. Sending someone a file by
using the File Attach option in a FidoNet mailer.

File Request

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[FidoNet]

1. n. The
FidoNet equivalent of FTP, in
which one FidoNet system automatically dials another and
snarfs one or more files. Often abbreviated
FReq; files are often announced as
being “available for FReq” in the same way that files are
announced as being “available for/by anonymous FTP” on the
Internet.

2. vt. The act of getting a copy
of a file by using the File Request option of the FidoNet mailer.

firmy: /fer'mee/, n.

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Syn. stiffy (a 3.5-inch floppy disk).

FTP: /F-T-P/, not, /fit'ip/

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1. [techspeak] n. The File
Transfer Protocol for transmitting files between systems on the Internet.

2. vt. To
beam a file using the File Transfer Protocol.

3. Sometimes used as a generic even for file transfers not using
FTP. “Lemme get a copy of
Wuthering Heights ftp'd from uunet.”

FUD wars: /fuhd worz/, n.

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old-time standards wars have been replaced by closed vs, open source.)

[from FUD] Political posturing engaged in by
hardware and software vendors ostensibly committed to standardization but
actually willing to fragment the market to protect their own shares. The
Unix International vs.: OSF conflict about Unix standards was one
outstanding example; Microsoft vs. Netscape vs. W3C about HTML standards is
another.

fuzzball: n.

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[TCP/IP hackers] A DEC LSI-11 running a particular suite of
homebrewed software written by Dave Mills and assorted co-conspirators,
used in the early 1980s for Internet protocol testbedding and
experimentation. These were used as NSFnet backbone sites in its early
56kb-line days; a few were still active on the Internet as late as
mid-1993, doing odd jobs such as network time service.

gabriel: /gay'bree-@l/, n.

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[for Dick Gabriel, SAIL LISP hacker and volleyball fanatic] An
unnecessary (in the opinion of the opponent) stalling tactic, e.g., tying
one's shoelaces or combing one's hair repeatedly, asking the time, etc.
Also used to refer to the perpetrator of such tactics. Also, pulling a Gabriel, Gabriel mode.

gripenet: n.

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[IBM] A wry (and thoroughly unofficial) name for IBM's internal VNET
system, deriving from its common use by IBMers to voice pointed criticism
of IBM management that would be taboo in more formal channels.

gun: vt.

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[ITS, now rare: from the :GUN
command] To forcibly terminate a program or job (computer, not career).
“Some idiot left a background process running soaking up half the
cycles, so I gunned it.” Compare can,
blammo.

Gosperism: /gos'p@r-izm/, n.

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A hack, invention, or saying due to elder
days arch-hacker R. William (Bill) Gosper. This notion merits
its own term because there are so many of them. Many of the entries in
HAKMEM are Gosperisms; see also
life.

grault: /grawlt/, n.

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Yet another metasyntactic variable, invented
by Mike Gallaher and propagated by the GOSMACS
documentation. See corge.

haque: /hak/, n.

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[Usenet] Variant spelling of hack, used only
for the noun form and connoting an elegant hack,
that is a hack in sense 2.

hobbit: n.

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1. [rare] The High Order BIT of a byte; same as the meta
bit or high bit.

2. The non-ITS name of @email{vad@ai.mit.edu} (*Hobbit*), master of
lasers.

humma: //, excl.

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A filler word used on various chat and talk programs when you had nothing to say but
felt that it was important to say something. The word apparently
originated (at least with this definition) on the MECC Timeshare System
(MTS, a now-defunct educational time-sharing system running in Minnesota
during the 1970s and the early 1980s) but was later sighted on early Unix
systems. Compare the U.K's wibble.

IBM discount: n.

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A price increase. Outside IBM, this derives from the common
perception that IBM products are generally overpriced (see
clone); inside, it is said to spring from a belief
that large numbers of IBM employees living in an area cause prices to
rise.

inc: /ink/, v.

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Verbal (and only rarely written) shorthand for increment, i.e. ‘increase by one’.
Especially used by assembly programmers, as many assembly languages have an
inc mnemonic. Antonym: dec (see
DEC).

jolix: /joh'liks/, n.,adj.

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386BSD, the freeware port of the BSD Net/2 release to the Intel i386
architecture by Bill Jolitz, Lynne Greer Jolitz, and friends. Used to
differentiate from BSDI's port based on the same source tape, which used to
be called BSD/386 and is now BSD/OS. See
BSD.

lace card: n. obs.

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A punched card with all holes punched (also
called a whoopee card or ventilator card). Card readers tended to jam
when they got to one of these, as the resulting card had too little
structural strength to avoid buckling inside the mechanism. Card punches
could also jam trying to produce these things owing to power-supply
problems. When some practical joker fed a lace card through the reader,
you needed to clear the jam with a card
knife — which you used on the joker first.

lasherism: n.

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[Harvard] A program that solves a standard problem (such as the
Eight Queens puzzle or implementing the life
algorithm) in a deliberately nonstandard way. Distinguished from a
crock or kluge by the fact
that the programmer did it on purpose as a mental exercise. Such
constructions are quite popular in exercises such as the
Obfuscated C Contest, and occasionally in
retrocomputing. Lew Lasher was a student at Harvard
around 1980 who became notorious for such behavior.

LDB: /l@'d@b/, vt.

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[from the PDP-10 instruction set] To extract from the middle.
“LDB me a slice of cake, please.” This usage has been kept
alive by Common LISP's function of the same name. Considered silly.

macrotape: /mak'roh-tayp/, n.

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An industry-standard reel of tape. Originally, as opposed to a DEC
microtape; nowadays, as opposed to modern QIC and DDS tapes.
Syn. round tape.

microfloppies: n.

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3.5-inch floppies, as opposed to 5.25-inch
vanilla or mini-floppies and the now-obsolete 8-inch
variety. This term may be headed for obsolescence as 5.25-inchers pass out
of use, only to be revived if anybody floats a sub-3-inch floppy standard.
See stiffy,
minifloppies.

minifloppies: n.,obs.

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5.25-inch floppy disks, as opposed to 3.5-inch or
microfloppies and the long-obsolescent 8-inch
variety (if there is ever a smaller size, they will undoubtedly be tagged
nanofloppies). At one time, this
term was a trademark of Shugart Associates for their SA-400 minifloppy
drive. Nobody paid any attention. See
stiffy.

GFR: /G-F-R/, vt.

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[ITS: from `Grim File Reaper', an ITS and LISP Machine utility] To
remove a file or files according to some program-automated or
semi-automatic manual procedure, especially one designed to reclaim mass
storage space or reduce name-space clutter (the original GFR actually moved
files to tape). Often generalized to pieces of data below file level.
“I used to have his phone number, but I guess I
GFRed it.” See also
prowler, reaper. Compare
GC, which discards only provably worthless
stuff.

multician: /muhl-ti'shn/, n.

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[coined at Honeywell, ca. 1970] Competent user of
Multics. Perhaps oddly, no one has ever promoted
the analogous `Unician'.

netrock: /net'rok/, n.

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[IBM] A flame; used esp.: on VNET, IBM's
internal corporate network.

nroff: /N'rof/

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n. [Unix, from “new
roff” (see troff)] A companion program to the
Unix typesetter troff, accepting identical input but
preparing output for terminals and line printers.

A piece of code or coding technique that takes advantage of the
unprotected single-tasking environment in IBM PCs and the like running DOS,
e.g., by busy-waiting on a hardware register, direct diddling of screen
memory, or using hard timing loops. Compare
ill-behaved, vaxism,
unixism. Also, PC-ware n., a program full of PC-isms on a
machine with a more capable operating system. Pejorative.

Helen Keller mode: n.

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1. State of a hardware or software system that is deaf, dumb, and
blind, i.e., accepting no input and generating no output, usually due to an
infinite loop or some other excursion into deep
space. (Unfair to the real Helen Keller, whose success at
learning speech was triumphant.) See also go
flatline, catatonic.

2. On IBM PCs under DOS, refers to a specific failure mode in which
a screen saver has kicked in over an ill-behaved
application which bypasses the very interrupts the screen saver watches for
activity. Your choices are to try to get from the program's current state
through a successful save-and-exit without being able to see what you're
doing, or to re-boot the machine. This isn't (strictly speaking) a
crash.

node: n.

Revision 3.3.2

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Deleted: UUCP and serial-line BBSses are both
obsolete.

1. [Internet, UUCP] A host machine on the network.

2. [MS-DOS BBSes] A dial-in line on a BBS. Thus an MS-DOS
sysop might say that his BBS has 4 nodes even though
it has a single machine and no Internet link, confusing an Internet hacker
no end.

OSU: /O-S-U/, n. obs.

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Added

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Deleted: No evidence of live usage.

[TMRC] Acronym for Officially Sanctioned User; a user who is
recognized as such by the computer authorities and allowed to use the
computer above the objections of the security monitor.

P-mail: n.

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Deleted: No evidence of live use.

[rare] Physical mail, as opposed to email.
Synonymous with snail-mail, but much less
common.

square tape: n.

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Changed

Revision 4.4.0

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Deleted: All tape is square (e.g. DLTs)
now.

Mainframe magnetic tape cartridges for use with IBM 3480 or
compatible tape drives; or QIC tapes used on workstations and micros. The
term comes from the square (actually rectangular) shape of the cartridges;
contrast round tape.

PETSCII: /pet'skee/, n. obs.

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Deleted: Long dead along with the Commodore
PET

[abbreviation of PET ASCII] The variation (many would say
perversion) of the ASCII character set used by the
Commodore Business Machines PET series of personal computers and the later
Commodore C64, C16, C128, and VIC20 machines. The PETSCII set used
left-arrow and up-arrow (as in old-style ASCII) instead of underscore and
caret, placed the unshifted alphabet at positions 65--90, put the shifted
alphabet at positions 193--218, and added graphics characters.

rib site: n.

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Deleted: Obsolete along with UUCP.

[by analogy with backbone site] A machine
that has an on-demand high-speed link to a backbone
site and serves as a regional distribution point for lots of
third-party traffic in email and Usenet news. Compare leaf
site, backbone site.

rice box: n.

Revision 2.1.1

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Deleted: No evidence of live usage.

[from ham radio slang] Any Asian-made commodity computer, esp.: an
80x86-based machine built to IBM PC-compatible ISA or EISA-bus
standards.

Unflattering hackerism for SunOS, the BSD Unix variant supported on
Sun Microsystems's Unix workstations (see also
sun-stools), and compare
Macintrash, HP-SUX. Despite
what this term might suggest, Sun was founded by hackers and still enjoys
excellent relations with hackerdom; usage is more often in exasperation
than outright loathing.

sidecar: n.

Revision 2.5.1

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Deleted: Obsolete along with the micros it refers
to.

1. Syn. slap on the side. Esp.: used of
add-ons for the late and unlamented IBM PCjr.

2. The IBM PC compatibility box that could be bolted onto the side
of an Amiga. Designed and produced by Commodore, it broke all of the
company's own design rules. If it worked with any other peripherals, it
was by magic.

3. More generally, any of various devices designed to be connected
to the expansion slot on the left side of the Amiga 500 (and later, 600
& 1200), which included a hard drive controller, a hard drive, and
additional memory.

tall card: n.

Revision 2.4.3

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Revision 4.4.0

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Deleted: AT-sized expansion cards are now
standard.

A PC/AT-size expansion card (these can be larger than IBM PC or XT
cards because the AT case is bigger). See also short
card. When IBM introduced the PS/2 model 30 (its last gasp at
supporting the ISA) they made the case lower and many industry-standard
tall cards wouldn't fit; this was felt to be a reincarnation of the
connector conspiracy, done with less style.

terpri: /ter'pree/, vi.

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Deleted: archaic as jargon even in CLISP, whicg still has
the function.

[from LISP 1.5 (and later, MacLISP)] To output a
newline. Now rare as jargon, though still used as
techspeak in Common LISP. It is a contraction of `TERminate PRInt line',
named for the fact that, on some early OSes and hardware, no characters
would be printed until a complete line was formed, so this operation
terminated the line and emitted the output.

UUCPNET: n. obs.

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Deleted: UUCP is dead.

The store-and-forward network consisting of all the world's
connected Unix machines (and others running some clone of the UUCP
(Unix-to-Unix CoPy) software). Any machine reachable only via a
bang path is on UUCPNET. This term has been
rendered obsolescent by the spread of cheap Internet connections in the
1990s; the few remaining UUCP links are essentially slow channels to the
Internet rather than an autonomous network. See network
address.

VAXectomy: /vak-sek't@-mee/, n.

Revision 2.7.1

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Deleted: Pretty much everybody is VAXectomized by
now.

[by analogy with ‘vasectomy’] A VAX removal.
DEC's Microvaxen, especially, are much slower than
newer RISC-based workstations such as the SPARC. Thus, if one knows one
has a replacement coming, VAX removal can be cause for celebration.

vaxherd: /vaks'herd/, n. obs.

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Deleted: Today's VAXen don't have
operators.

[from ‘oxherd’] A VAX operator. The image is reinforced
because VAXen actually did tend to come in herds, technically known as
clusters.

vaxism: /vak'sizm/, n.

Revision 2.2.1

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Added

Revision 4.4.0

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Deleted: The variety of architectures has decreased.
Almost all machines (and, in particular, micros) look like VAXes
now.

A piece of code that exhibits vaxocentrism in
critical areas. Compare unixism.

W2K bug

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Deleted: It was. And nobody noticed.

[from `Y2K bug' for the Year 2000 problem] The deployment of
Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system, which hackers generally expect
will turn out to have been among the worst train wrecks in the history of
software engineering. Such is the power of Microsoft marketing, however,
that it is also expected this will not become obvious until it has incurred
hundreds of millions of dollars in downtime and lost opportunity
costs.

woofer: n.

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Deleted: Pin-feed printers are dead.

[University of Waterloo] Some varieties of wide paper for printers
have a perforation 8.5 inches from the left margin that allows the excess
on the right-hand side to be torn off when the print format is 80 columns
or less wide. The right-hand excess may be called ‘woofer’.
This term (like tweeter) has been in use at Waterloo
since 1972, but is elsewhere unknown. In audio jargon, the word refers to
the bass speaker(s) on a hi-fi.

Yellow Book: n.

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Deleted: Seems to no longer be in any live
use.

The print version of this Jargon File; The New Hacker's
Dictionary from MIT Press; The book includes essentially all
the material in the File, plus a Foreword by Guy L.: Steele Jr. and a
Preface by Eric S. Raymond. Most importantly, the book version is nicely
typeset and includes almost all of the infamous Crunchly cartoons by the
Great Quux, each attached to an appropriate entry. The first edition
(1991, ISBN 0-262-68069-6) corresponded to the Jargon File version 2.9.6.
The second edition (1993, ISBN 0-262-68079-3) corresponded to the Jargon
File 3.0.0. The third (1996, ISBN 0-262-68092-0) corresponded to
4.0.0.

slap on the side: n.

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Deleted: Dead along with the micros that used
it.

(also called a sidecar, or abbreviated
SOTS.) A type of external expansion
hardware marketed by computer manufacturers (e.g., Commodore for the Amiga
500/1000 series and IBM for the hideous failure called ‘PCjr’).
Various SOTS boxes provided necessities such as memory, hard drive
controllers, and conventional expansion slots.

tweeter: n.

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Deleted: Goes with woofer

[University of Waterloo] Syn. perf,
chad (sense 1). This term (like
woofer) has been in use at Waterloo since 1972 but
is elsewhere unknown. In audio jargon, the word refers to the treble
speaker(s) on a hi-fi.

SOS: /S-O-S/

Revision 1.1.0

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Revision 4.1.1

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Changed: dropped PDP-10 instruction sense
2

Revision 4.2.0

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Changed

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Deleted: It's been pushing two decades since anyone used
SOS for production.

n.,obs. An infamously
losing text editor. Once, back in the 1960s, when a
text editor was needed for the PDP-6, a hacker crufted together a
quick-and-dirty `stopgap editor' to be used until a
better one was written. Unfortunately, the old one was never really
discarded when new ones came along. SOS is a descendant (`Son of Stopgap')
of that editor, and many PDP-10 users gained the dubious pleasure of its
acquaintance. Since then other programs similar in style to SOS have been
written, notably the early font editor BILOS /bye'lohs/, the Brother-In-Law Of Stopgap
(the alternate expansion `Bastard Issue, Loins of Stopgap' has been
proposed).

1. /sos/vt. To decrease; inverse of
AOS, from the PDP-10 instruction set.

stiffy: n.

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Deleted: Floppies are dead.

3.5-inch floppies, so called because their jackets are more rigid
than those of the 5.25-inch and the (now totally obsolete) 8-inch floppy.
Elsewhere this might be called a firmy. For some odd reason, several sources
have taken the trouble to inform us that this term is widespread in South
Africa. Australians, on the other hand, suggest being careful with it when
Down Under, as it is there universally slang for an erection.

short card: n.

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Deleted: Goes with 'tall card'

A half-length IBM XT expansion card or adapter that will fit in one
of the two short slots located towards the right rear of a standard chassis
(tucked behind the floppy disk drives). See also tall
card.

Silver Book: n.

Revision 2.1.1

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Added: (deduced from diffs)

Jensen and Wirth's infamous Pascal User Manual and
Report, so called because of the silver cover of the widely
distributed Springer-Verlag second edition of 1978 (ISBN 0-387-90144-2).
See book titles,
Pascal.

[now obs.] Without a prefix, this almost invariably refers to
BSD Unix release 4.2. Note that it is an indication
of cluelessness to say “version 4.2”, and “release
4.2” is rare; the number stands on its own, or is used in the more
explicit forms 4.2BSD or (less commonly) BSD 4.2. Similar remarks apply to
“4.3”, “4.4” and to earlier, less-widespread
releases 4.1 and 2.9.

AI koans: /A-I koh'anz/, pl.n.

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Revision 4.4.0

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Deleted: Duplicates 'koan'

A series of pastiches of Zen teaching riddles created by Danny
Hillis at the MIT AI Lab around various major figures of the Lab's culture
(several are included under Some AI Koans in
Appendix A). See also ha ha only serious,
mu, and hacker humor.

Big Gray Wall: n.

Revision 2.3.1

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Added: (deduced from diffs)

Revision 2.9.6

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Renamed: 'Big Grey Wall' -> 'Big Gray Wall' (deduced from
diffs)

Revision 2.9.10

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Changed

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Deleted: No evidence of live use on the Web, October
2002.

What faces a VMS user searching for
documentation. A full VMS kit comes on a pallet, the documentation taking
up around 15 feet of shelf space before the addition of layered products
such as compilers, databases, multivendor networking, and programming
tools. Recent (since VMS version 5) documentation comes with gray binders;
under VMS version 4 the binders were orange (big
orange wall), and under version 3 they were blue. See
VMS. Often contracted to Gray Wall.

Blue Book: n.

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Deleted: All three books are obsolete or superseded by more
recent versions.

1. Informal name for one of the four standard references on the
page-layout and graphics-control language PostScript
(PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook, Adobe
Systems, Addison-Wesley 1985, QA76.73.P67P68, ISBN 0-201-10179-3); the
other three official guides are known as the Green
Book, the Red Book, and the
White Book (sense 2).

2. Informal name for one of the three standard references on
Smalltalk: Smalltalk-80: The Language and its
Implementation, David Robson, Addison-Wesley 1983,
QA76.8.S635G64, ISBN 0-201-11371-63 (this book also has green and red
siblings).

3. Any of the 1988 standards issued by the CCITT's ninth plenary
assembly. These include, among other things, the X.400 email spec and the
Group 1 through 4 fax standards. See also book
titles.

Green Book: n.

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Revision 4.4.0

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Deleted: These Green Books are obsolete or
superseded.

1. One of the four standard PostScript
references: PostScript Language Program Design,
bylined `Adobe Systems' (Addison-Wesley, 1988; QA76.73.P67P66 ISBN
0-201-14396-8); see also Red Book, Blue
Book, and the White Book (sense 2).

2. Informal name for one of the three standard references on
SmallTalk: Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of
Advice, by Glenn Krasner (Addison-Wesley, 1983; QA76.8.S635S58;
ISBN 0-201-11669-3) (this, too, is associated with blue and red books).

3. The X/Open Compatibility Guide, which
defines an international standard Unix environment
that is a proper superset of POSIX/SVID; also includes descriptions of a
standard utility toolkit, systems administration features, and the like.
This grimoire is taken with particular seriousness in Europe. See
Purple Book.

5. Any of the 1992 standards issued by the CCITT's tenth plenary
assembly. These include, among other things, the X.400 email standard and
the Group 1 through 4 fax standards. See also book
titles.

Red Book: n.

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Changed

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Changed

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Deleted: These Red Books are now too old to be useful
examples.

1. Informal name for one of the four standard references on
PostScript (PostScript Language Reference
Manual, Adobe Systems (Addison-Wesley, 1985; QA76.73.P67P67;
ISBN 0-201-10174-2, or the 1990 second edition ISBN 0-201-18127-4); the
others are known as the Green Book, the
Blue Book, and the White Book
(sense 2).

2. Informal name for one of the 3 standard references on Smalltalk
(Smalltalk-80: The Interactive Programming
Environment by Adele Goldberg (Addison-Wesley, 1984;
QA76.8.S635G638; ISBN 0-201-11372-4); this too is associated with blue and
green books).

3. Any of the 1984 standards issued by the CCITT eighth plenary
assembly. These include, among other things, the X.400 email spec and the
Group 1 through 4 fax standards.

4. The new version of the Green Book (sense
4) — IEEE 1003.1-1990, a.k.a ISO 9945-1 — is (because of the
color and the fact that it is printed on A4 paper) known in the USA as
“the Ugly Red Book That Won't Fit On The Shelf” and in Europe
as “the Ugly Red Book That's A Sensible Size”.

Deleted: According to an Oct 2002 Google search, this sense
no longer seems to be live.

Planned but non-existent product like
vaporware, but with the added implication that
marketing is actively selling and promoting it (they've printed brochures).
Brochureware is often deployed as a strategic weapon; the idea is to con
customers into not committing to an existing product of the competition's.
It is a safe bet that when a brochureware product finally becomes real, it
will be more expensive than and inferior to the alternatives that had been
available for years.

desk check: n.,v.

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Revision 4.4.0

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Deleted: Techspeak.

To grovel over hardcopy of source code,
mentally simulating the control flow; a method of catching bugs. No longer
common practice in this age of on-screen editing, fast compiles, and
sophisticated debuggers — though some maintain stoutly that it ought
to be. Compare eyeball search,
vdiff, vgrep.

echo: n.

Revision 2.4.1

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Revision 4.4.0

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Deleted: FidoNet slang, no longer
interesting.

A topic group on
FidoNet's echomail system. Compare
newsgroup.

fd leak: /F-D leek/, n.

Revision 2.1.5

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Added: (deduced from diffs)

Revision 4.4.0

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Deleted: Readily scrutable from its component
parts.

A kind of programming bug analogous to a core
leak, in which a program fails to close file descriptors
(fds) after file operations are
completed, and thus eventually runs out of them. See
leak.

g-file: n.

Revision 3.2.0

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Added

Revision 4.4.0

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Deleted: No live usage revealed by Oct 2002 Google
search.

[Commodore BBS culture] Any file that is written with the intention
of being read by a human rather than a machine, such as the Jargon File,
documentation, humor files, hacker lore, and technical materials.

This term survives from the nearly forgotten Commodore 64 underground
and BBS community. In the early 80s, C-Net had emerged as the most popular
C64 BBS software for systems which encouraged messaging (as opposed to file
transfer). There were three main options for files: Program files
(p-files), which served the same function as `doors' in today's systems, UD
files (the user upload/download section), and g-files. Anything that was
meant to be read was included in g-files.

gag: vi.

Revision 2.1.1

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Revision 4.4.0

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Deleted: mainstream

Equivalent to choke, but connotes more
disgust. “Hey, this is FORTRAN code. No wonder the C compiler
gagged.” See also barf.

machinable: adj.

Revision 2.8.1

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Revision 4.4.0

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Deleted: No evidence of live use, 2002.

Machine-readable. Having the softcopy
nature.

lexiphage: /lek'si-fayj`/, n.

Revision 2.9.6

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Added: (deduced from diffs)

Revision 3.1.0

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Changed

Revision 4.4.0

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Deleted: dead along with ITS

A notorious word chomper on ITS. See
bagbiter. This program would draw on a selected
victim's bitmapped terminal the words “THE BAG” in ornate
letters, followed by a pair of jaws biting pieces of it off.

line starve

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Revision 2.9.10

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Changed

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Changed

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Deleted: Obsolete along with line
printers.

1. [MIT] vi. To feed paper
through a printer the wrong way by one line (most printers can't do this).
On a display terminal, to move the cursor up to the previous line of the
screen. “To print `X squared', you just output `X', line starve,
`2', line feed.” (The line starve causes the `2' to appear on the
line above the `X', and the line feed gets back to the original line.)

2. n. A character (or character
sequence) that causes a terminal to perform this action. ASCII 0011010,
also called SUB or control-Z, was one common line-starve character in the
days before microcomputers and the X3.64 terminal standard. Today, the
term might be used for the ISO reverse line feed character 0x8D. Unlike
line feed, line starve is not
standard ASCII terminology. Even among hackers it
is considered a bit silly.

3. [proposed] A sequence such as \c (used in System V echo, as well
as troff) that suppresses a
newline or other character(s) that would normally be
emitted.

LPT: /L-P-T/, /lip'it/, /lip-it'/, n.

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Changed

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Deleted: Seems to be thoroughly dead at this
point.

1. Line printer (originally Line Printing Terminal). Rare under
Unix, more common among hackers who grew up with ITS, MS-DOS, CP/M and
other operating systems that were strongly influenced by early
DEC conventions.

2. Local PorT. Used among MS-DOS/Windows programmers (and so
expanded in the MS-DOS 5 manual). It seems likely this is a
backronym.

PDL: /P-D-L/, /pid'l/, /p@d'l/, /puhd'l/

Revision 1.1.0

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Deleted: Senses 4 and 5 are no longer live; remainder are
not enough to carry the entry.

1. n. `Program Design Language'.
Any of a large class of formal and profoundly useless pseudo-languages in
which management forces one to design programs. Too
often, management expects PDL descriptions to be maintained in parallel
with the code, imposing massive overhead to little or no benefit. See also
flowchart.

2. v. To design using a program
design language. “I've been pdling so long my eyes won't focus
beyond 2 feet.”

3. n. `Page Description
Language'. Refers to any language which is used to control a graphics
device, usually a laserprinter. The most common example is, of course,
Adobe's PostScript language, but there are many
others, such as Xerox InterPress, etc.

4. In ITS days, the preferred MITism for
stack. See overflow pdl.

5. Dave Lebling, one of the co-authors of
Zork; (his network address on
the ITS machines was at one time pdl@dms).

overflow pdl: n.

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Deleted: Goes with PDL

[MIT] The place where you put things when your
PDL is full. If you don't have one and too many
things get pushed, you forget something. The overflow pdl for a person's
memory might be a memo pad. This usage inspired the following
doggerel:

Hey, diddle, diddle
The overflow pdl
To get a little more stack;
If that's not enough
Then you lose it all,
And have to pop all the way back.
--The Great Quux

The term `pdl' (see PDL) seems to be primarily
an MITism; outside MIT this term is replaced by ‘overflow
stack’ (but that wouldn't rhyme with
`diddle').

pod: n.

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Revision 4.4.0

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Deleted: Seems to be dead in 2002.

[allegedly from abbreviation POD for `Prince Of Darkness'] A Diablo
630 (or, latterly, any letter-quality impact printer). From the DEC-10
PODTYPE program used to feed formatted text to it. Not to be confused with
P.O.D..